Lekking displays in contemporary organizations
Ethologically oriented, evolutionary and cross-species accounts of male dominance
The Authors
Jeffrey Braithwaite, Faculty of Medicine, Centre for Clinical Governance Research, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to draw on scientific models in conceptualising the evolutionary bases of contemporary behaviours, and make cross-species comparisons, to account for male managerial activities in situ in health organizations.
Design/methodology/approach – In the animal world, males of many species display in order to induce females to mate. Such lekking behaviour involves inter alia, strutting, puffing out, catching attention via the use of ornamental physical characteristics, exhibiting gaudily-coloured body parts, singing or splashing, and other courting and wooing strategies. The paper applies these behavioural repertoires as an explanatory device for male-dominant organizational lekking in a set of contemporary settings. It draws on six studies of managerial talk, appearance and behaviour in order to do so.
Findings – Within the organizational lek male managers display mainly by power dressing, positioning, and exercising power and influence via verbal and behavioural means. Social and religious mores prohibit overt sexual coupling in organizations but lekking for other rewards is nevertheless pursued by male managers. The paper explores this managerial patterning, compares it to the lekking behaviour of other species, and discusses points of comparison and departure. It shows how male managers display within various sub-habitats, and discusses the central issues of appearance, tasks and work assignment, physical interaction structure, and talk and physiognomy.
Practical implications – Understanding what makes people tick via deep explanations than are customarily rendered is a vital contribution of scholarship to the practical world of management.
Originality/value – The evolutionary bases of contemporary behaviours, and cross-species accounts, may prove useful paradigms for other theorists and empiricists in organizational studies, and could encourage the development of a new field that might be labeled evolutionary organizational behaviour.
Article Type:
Research paper
Keyword(s):
Human nature; Management activities; Behaviour; Organizational culture; Anthropology.
Journal:
Journal of Health, Organization and Management
Volume:
22
Number:
5
Year:
2008
pp:
529-559
Copyright ©
Emerald Group Publishing Limited
ISSN:
1477-7266
Let us now consider man [sic] in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet (Wilson, 1975).
Introduction
For some time scientists have been interested in the biological foundations of the social behaviour of organisms such as bees and wasps, marine creatures, birds, the big cats, and mammals of all kinds. Wilson's Sociobiology, for example, was a landmark work in exploring the biological bases for social behaviour (Wilson, 1975). In elapsed time, complex social interaction pre-dates humanity by billions of years.
Through common descent we are kin to all other life forms on this planet. Every organism emerged from the same origin – the so-called primordial soup – and shares the same chemical arrangements (Davies, 1999; Mayr, 2001). Our recent genesis is as one of the big apes, despite differences of degree or substance in consciousness, intelligence, complex religious beliefs, technology and a language- and artifact-based culture. The evidence is now considerable (Arnason et al., 1998; Ridley, 1993, 1999) that we diverged from chimpanzees between 10 and 5 million years ago – a mere blink of the evolutionary eye. There may have been several or many hominid species (Tattersal, 2003) but all except Homo sapiens and, until recently, Homo floresiensis, a small, hobbit-like human found in Indonesia in 2004, died out (Brown et al., 2004). A larger brain and bipedalism are two of the observable indicators of the evolutionary path to humans, and in more recent times the fossil evidence for these has been bolstered by genetic data on the origins of human traits (Carroll, 2003). Fast-forwarding to more recent times, anatomically modern humans are thought from DNA evidence to have spread from Africa within the past 100,000 years, and possibly within the last 89,000 years (Ke et al., 2001). Despite this differentiation, modern humans share more than 98 per cent of their genes with chimpanzees. As Diamond (1991) has noted, this is a distance closer than obviously related bird species like the red-eyed and white-eyed vireos.
Some investigators have directed their attention to the extrapolation of animal studies to early homo, and this has been extended by some sociobiologists to consider the evolutionary or cross-species underpinnings of contemporary human action. Thus, it is thought legitimate to apprehend human behaviour through the relational lens of animal studies. One line of enquiry is particularly interested in the socioecology of different species of primate. Topics of concern include social structuring and patterning in relation to environmental factors such as habitat (de Vore, 1963; Crook and Gartlan, 1966). It is a broad research project to benchmark human sociology against simian (Latour, 1996), or for that matter other species', sociology. Some pro-Darwinists would no doubt assert that the evidence of natural selection is so compelling, and we share so much DNA genetic code with other life forms, that it is nonsense to dichotomize the behaviour of humans and other species, especially primates (Stanford, 2001). Even dissenters would doubtless agree that at the level of analogy animal comparisons may be able to shed light on human activity, if only to show in relief points of similarity and counterpoints of departure.
Evolution, human nature and organization behavior
Male displays in context
The breadth of such a cross-species comparison lies beyond a brief paper, and hence needs to be sharply focused. Here, we look at one particular kind of routine found in nature and consider it in relation to the actions of a set of managers in circumscribed organizational settings.
When organizational behaviour scholars have looked at accounts of human nature in institutional contexts, whether explicitly or implicitly grounded in evolution, there are recurring themes in their reviews. Prominent are male dominance behaviours (Martin, 2001); covert sexual allusions in organizations (Collinson and Collinson, 1989; Hearn and Parkin, 1995); and gender differences (Calás and Smircich, 1991; Rafaeli et al., 1997). A distinguishable thread of normative literature offers advice on how to display by dressing for success for males (Molloy, 1988; Molloy, 1975); and females (Harragan, 1977). Some scholars (Markóczy and Goldberg, 1997, 1998; Kock, 2004) have begun the task of drawing on evolutionary psychology, a hybrid discipline which seeks to understand the evolved nature of the human mind (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992; Barkow, 1992), to apply to management studies. There have been intermittent attempts to situate some organizational studies in evolutionary context. There have for example been arguments that the social structures of modern institutions, and behaviour within them such as “resource foraging”, can be seen in a new light by comparing them with monkey troupe organization (Pierce and White, 1999). Other lines of research have argued that sex differences manifest in organizations are strongly determined by our evolutionary past (Browne, 2002). Dunbar (1996) has suggested that the genesis of human gossip is grooming in earlier primates.
Evolutionary psychology has made an intriguing case that various human characteristics such as survival skills, defending against aggression, finding mates, securing food and other resources and negotiating with others have their roots in the distant past and have been naturally selected (Braithwaite, 2005; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992; Barrett et al., 2002). But, this work is emergent, and dwarfed by mainstream types of organizational studies and theories. The theory being proposed here, standing outside organizational theory's current focus, is that male managerial display routines can be seen as alternative but keenly analogous forms to those which occur in other species which inhabit natural as opposed to built environments. Subjects' displays reported here are closely related in other species to male displays designed to seduce females but these behaviours are sanitized by human society.
As in other species, then, human males display for reward. In a number of breeding bird, mammal, crustacean and insect populations choosy females prefer males who display best or most prominently, or are already seen as successful (Höglund and Alatalo, 1995; Balmford, 1991; Boyce, 1990). Rewards are not distributed equitably, but are conferred disproportionally on the few; it turns out that success does, after all, breed success (Ridley, 1993).
The case will be argued here that displaying males in the sexually conservative human settings we call organizations also secure rewards. These, too, are distributed inequitably. The higher in the organizational hierarchy one is, the more extensive the benefits. Success for male managers is keyed to outcomes deemed socially appropriate, rather than to direct access to receptive females. Power, status, respect, income, perks and status symbols represent the main gains accumulated by efficacious organizational displayers. These may lead indirectly to increased sexual success, but we cannot observe that for the most part. Other organizational players are condemned to lesser rewards and their career progress is stalled, or is slower to realize, despite many high aspirations.
The scarcity of alternative accounts
Why is this kind of comparative study across species and the evolutionary past so scarce in organizational studies? One reason is that even a cursory glance at the journals shows that organizational investigators are overwhelmingly both contemporaneous and anthropocentric in outlook. Rarely, if ever do organizational researchers mention any evolutionary antecedents to current activities, events or issues, or see any comparative cross-species bases for individual behaviour within organizational settings. Primarily, this may represent lack of interest, or training, or focus, or a combination. A second reason, as Nord and Fox (1996) point out, is that the attention of much organizational research seems to have shifted from the individual to the context, and hence from the more specific to the more abstract. Topics investigated today centre on things like communication, structure and culture and, if Barley and Kunda's (2001) recent plea is answered, work, rather than subjects' behaviour in its own right. Moreover, thirdly, the divide noticed by Snow (1959) between the natural sciences on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences on the other seems as great as ever, even greater. A large number of scientists is not well trained in social science thinking, approaches and theories, and many social scientists know little of science. Specialization creates deep shafts, but these become actualized as knowledge silos that sharply delimit accessibility to others' disciplines.
Perhaps, a fourth reason lies with the interpretivist turn. Organizational theorists no longer seek, as they once did, to map some sort of photographic-like reality, a type of precisely documented testimony to the behaviour of their subjects. The descriptive text we know as the research paper is now construed to be less like a realistic picture and more like one version of any possible number of abstract paintings. van Maanen (1979) famously announced that the map was not the territory. For some commentators, all is translation, representation and metaphor (Clegg and Hardy, 1996). Organizations can multiply be re-framed, re-interpreted and re-perceived. For an aphorism, we might reflect on Wittgenstein's (1965) argument and how it holds sway with many organizational scholars: “what is needed is a continued readiness to recognize that every point of view is particular to certain definite situations”.
Relativism therefore looms large under postmodernist views of organization. Indeed, some contemporary sociologists conceptualize all social theory as merely a set of stories and research reports as storytelling (Law and Moser, 1999). Moreover, for many theorists today, the socially constructed nature of organizational observations and their renderings say as much about their author-researchers as the observed (Chia, 1997). Thus, the normal science approach is no longer de rigeur, or even privileged, but is merely one approach among many.
Past management and organizational accounts
It was not always that way in the case of management behaviour. Early observational studies of managers used a variety of methods and were intent on accurate, real-world profiling of action. Carlson (1951) asked a group of managing directors of Swedish companies to record what they did at work. Both Carlson and Luthans and his co-workers (Luthans et al., 1985) used trained observers supplied with a checklist and questionnaire to catalogue managerial activities. A number of researchers asked managerial participants to self-record how they spent their time (Burns, 1954, 1957; Horne and Lupton, 1965; Stewart, 1967). Others conducted structured observations of participants (Guest, 1956; Jasinsky, 1956; Ponder, 1957; O'Neill and Kubany, 1959).
The trend in later years has been to undertake more pluralist studies involving these kinds of methods as well as techniques such as interviews and document reviews. This emerged in the work of the managerial empiricists such as Mintzberg (1973, 1971), Stewart (1976, 1982) and Kotter (1982a, b). But, in the half century between Carlson in 1951 and now, postmodernism and interpretivism arrived, and attempts at fine-grained, real-world depictions of behaviour were subsumed under Cubist differentiation, fragmentation and constructivism.
Ethology and organizational lekking
An ethological approach
What seems to be missing from earlier and more recent work, however, is a portrayal of managerial behaviour from the perspective of the ethologist. Looking at management activity through this frame facilitates, the mobilization once again of a more normal science approach to behaviour. Ethology is concerned to examine patterns of behaviour in naturalistic settings. The classic image is that of the field biologist, making observations of wild animals from a cleverly camouflaged hide. Typically, ethologists attempt clear descriptions of their observations as free from a priori hypotheses as possible (Blurton-Jones, 1972; Richards and Bernal, 1972). Those in the normal science mould would applaud. Those who reject scientism would demur. Yet either way, an account that has not been textualized cannot add to the store of knowledge required by the scientists or the plurality of renderings sought by the interpretivists.
This is not to deny that prior offerings in organizational studies have produced richly textured accounts which have highlighted how humans behave in various settings. Consciously or unconsciously, all field researchers pack a set of balance scales, and use them to determine the relative weight given observation and interpretation (Vail, 2001). Although every researcher needs to make sense of what they see or are told, to try to put aside premature explanations of psychology and sociology may be no bad thing. There are most likely more errors created by jumping to conclusions (and its close cousin, as Kuhn (1970) has reminded us, of unreflexively privileging extant ideas and paradigms) than we care to admit. Of the ethnographers whose work shows how they seem to have taken more of an ethological than ethnographic stance, and thereby have resisted precipitate evaluations, nourishment comes from those whose writings, crafted after prolonged and deep immersion in the field, have created a richly realized formative weave: Weick (1993a, b) and colleagues on aircraft carrier crew and firefighters, Jackall (1988) on corporate executives, Barley (1986, 1996) on radiographers, van Maanen (1975) on police and Goffman (1961) on hospital psychiatric inpatients. But the point made here is that we may have produced too few emic accounts such that organisational research may risk the charge of imbalance. The difference between the present work and most renderings is the degree of researcher distance, the cross-species comparative approach and the evolutionary perspective.
Even so, some might seek to counter an ethologically oriented, evolution-anchored account of human behaviour, and want to locate it within the sociobiology debate, a subset of the biological determinist wars (Rose, 1982). This has been a highly moralized, sometimes bitter argument fought over more than a quarter century to a seeming standstill (Segerstråle, 2000). A central question is the weight given biological or cultural influences on human behaviour. There are strong grounds for circumventing this problem here. Humans are biological organisms, but are also social beings. We are products of both biology and culture (Relethford, 1990). Untangling the biological and social cause and effect of human behaviour does not concern this paper. For instance, the extent to which people are innately programmed through natural selection, or their behaviour is modified by social complexity, consciousness, culture and morality, seems unknowable at any broad level in the absence of detailed specifics. Although some have now sought to celebrate sociobiology (Alcock, 2001), it is destined to remain a contested landscape (Schultz and Lavenda, 1995). As Wilson (1998) recently indicated:
[…] we know that virtually all human behaviour is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact.
Wilson has argued for consilience, a term borrowed from a nineteenth century scientist, William Whewell, and which stands for an approach which views the academic divide between the natural and social sciences not as an unbridgeable fault line but topography to be explored and unified. This idea may have considerable heuristic value. In organizational terms, it may resonate with those who favour studies in the multi-method, triangulated mode, especially those who seek to create interplay across paradigms (Schultz and Hatch, 1996). This is by no means an uncontroversial issue, however, with some who argue for incommensurability across bounded theoretical divides (Burrell and Morgan, 1979; Jackson and Carter, 1991, 1993).It is clear that extrapolation from animal to human behaviour can be fraught with difficulty on other grounds. The chimpanzee's “smile” turned out to be a fear grin, after all (British Society for Social Responsibility in Science – Sociobiology Group – BSSRS-SG, 1984b), and what any observer sees, and the categories of behaviour he or she derives from observations, are socially constructed. Yet, the idea of generating accounts of human behaviour from an analysis of animal behaviour is deeply entrenched although taken-for-granted, even amongst social researchers. As one example from many, it was 80 years ago that Schjelderup-Ebbe (1922) first noted a “pecking order” amongst chickens. According to the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science – Sociobiology Group – BSSRS-SG, 1984a, “within two decades of the publication of this paper, dominance hierarchies had been uncovered in most of the vertebrate families and the concept was later extended to invertebrates”. Which observers of human social settings today would fail to see a pecking order when humans, even only a few, gather together interactively? Notice the process goes two ways. Anthropomorphism in accounts of animal behaviour, and animal behaviour extrapolated to human social accounts, are both often so normatively taken-for-granted as to be largely unquestioned.
If we cannot (or cannot readily) unravel much of this, nevertheless we might agree for the present that in mobilizing an ethologically oriented frame we could come to accept that some animal behavioural repertoires seem to have their analogue in human social settings. Morgan (1997) and Bolman and Deal (1997) amongst others have shown that there are many windows into organizational understanding. At bottom, an ethologically oriented observational study might encourage fresh ways of looking at and reflecting on behaviour in organizations. And it might bring to the surface implicit assumptions.
The ethological end result of studies of managers might be a carefully constructed, detailed micro-description similar to the kind produced by those who work in the wild, observe surreptitiously and then report as precisely as possible on animal behaviour in situ. One way to accomplish this involves invoking the ideas of the lek and the display, applied to male dominance behaviours. This involves assigning analytic weight to a language and conceptual schema rooted in a novel approach for organizational studies. It is to this task that we turn.
Lekking, its value and costs
Lekking routines are common in many species. “Lek” is taken from the verb leka, the Swedish word for play (Höglund and Alatalo, 1995)
For example, strutting and inflating its breast air sacs constitutes the defining lekking behaviour of the sage grouse of the western USA (Boyce, 1990). Females visit these displays. Males who display best are most likely to mate, as are the most central males in the lekking grounds (Balmford, 1991). Female lekking choice can be reinforcing (Pomiankowski, 1990). For instance, a female sage grouse or turkey will copy (Dugatkin, 1992; Gibson and Hoglund, 1992) –, i.e. prefer to mate with a male who has already mated or even, in the case of the guppy fish or the fallow deer, one who has merely courted another female. One possible explanation is that if you effectively display your power and success then you will be seen as powerful and successful.
In competing, males of some species tend to intensify the display and their physical features across evolutionary time in response to female predilections. The peacock, for instance, has evolved an extreme plumage over countless generations, fashioned by peahen preferences. How far this can go is limited by the risks of seducing peahens over threats of predators (Jones, 1999). Some species use a combination of behaviour and physical display strategies. Others rely more on behaviour than physical modification. The range of display is wide, and includes, inter alia, strutting, puffing out, catching attention via the use of ornamental physical characteristics, exhibiting gaudily coloured body parts, singing or splashing, and other courting and wooing strategies.
Lekking has value for both sexes. For males, it circumscribes the habitat to which females will be drawn. For females, it provides a market, and the possibility that the best, most attractive displayer is most likely to be healthy – the one with the best genes, and the most free from parasites and disease. It also has costs. Male costs include competition, and the possibility that bright or extravagant displays may alert predators. Females also face competition and they may be seduced by a liar; one who is in fact second rate but displays deceptively well (Krebs and Dawkins, 1978).
Organizational lekking
Analogous managerial lekking behaviour can be postulated in contemporary organizations. Managers (by far the majority are male)
They do so not to mate (although there may be occasions when they might want to) but to achieve multiple other goals including various personal, career and organizational objectives. In organizations, there are deeply sedimented, taken-for-granted rules and routines which constrain or prohibit displays leading to spontaneous, public copulation
It is possible to argue that lekking behaviour in organizations is a modification of the display processes, gaudy plumage and puffing out behaviour found in the wild to something socially equivalent in humans, and which produces more societally approved outcomes
Displaying within the organizational lek seems, then, to involve re-channelling of more primal urges into the attainment of personal and career benefits. Freudians might say this is displacement or sublimation, and argue that it is still sex that ultimately, and unconsciously, drives this behaviour. This may or may not be the case but it is not the aim of this paper to explore putative mental apparatus like the superego, ego and the id, or people's in-use defence mechanisms.
The goal instead is ethologic. The central purpose of this work is to give an account of organizational lekking behaviour among managers not so much to see how often this leads to sex, however interesting such an investigation would be for some. Instead, the aim is to analyze the organizationally sanctioned version of displaying at the level of observable behaviour, and responses to it. Questions include where, when and how do managers enact their displays, how do they appear when doing so, what the mechanisms are for tasks and work to be allocated, what physical interactional structures emerge from display, what kinds of talk and emotions are exhibited by displayers, and what benefits and outcomes do managers secure in exchange for their modified lekking activities? This is a fresh strategy for social scientists. A search of “lek” and “lekking” between 1986 and 2005 in ABI/Inform Global, and between 1975 and 2005 in Arts and Humanities Citation Index, two research databases, yielded only one article in which social investigators had used the concept to account for behaviour – in that case, mobile phone use in a single's bar (Lycett and Dunbar, 2000). It is an analytically useful device – one that seeks to “make strange” (Garfinkel, 1972) ordinary human behaviour, and is more emic than etic. If this can be achieved, we will see rendered a micro-narrative of male dominance behaviour. It will be a distinguishable account from earlier ones of male dominance in that it will hopefully promote a relatively precise, non-participant, researcher-at-a-distance report of findings.
Method
The extensive data-gathering program reported here began as an investigation of health care managers in a rational-instrumental mode, and a lekking frame increasingly suggested an ethologically influenced approach
Aim and subjects
The focus of attention was male managerial behaviour. The objective was to document subjects' displays in situ as a comparative set of repertoires to males in other species. The research program does not seek to discriminate for or against any gender, but sought to furnish a relative account of displaying which was closest to that found in the wild, and the best documentation available is of male lekking.
Data gathering approaches
Humans, like animals, display via appearance and behaviour. But they also verbalize. For managers, talk is inseparably a feature of their interpersonal routines. Thus, three data-gathering methods were used to register managers' displays and create field notes or transcripts: observationally based descriptions of appearance; ethologically oriented profiling of behaviour; and content-analytic probing of talk.
Studies and settings
Six discrete studies across eight Australian settings and contexts form the empirical base for the findings. Study one involved unobtrusive observational work in a large academic medical centre conducted over a six-year period from 1988 to 1994 as the hospital was restructured (Braithwaite et al., 2006), introduced various new programs and services and concentrated on improving efficiency and quality of care. The author participated in various roles from middle level department head to executive team member (Hickie, 1994; Braithwaite, 1995). The routines and rituals of multiple managers across various ranks from the chief executive, other executives and various clinical and non-clinical middle level managers were observed. During this component of the program, the idea took root that talk and subjects' behaviour displays exhibited strong parallels with elaborated sexual lekking in animals in natural environments.
In the second and third studies, detailed non-participant observations of four clinician-managers as they went about their operational management roles were carried out in two different academic medical centres over an extended period from 1996 to 1999 (Braithwaite, 2006). The researcher attempted to minimize interaction with participants and simply followed them around in their daily activities so far was as possible, making field notes across time (Braithwaite, 1999; Braithwaite et al., 2004). The observational work of the second and third studies was preceded by semi-structured interviews at each site of various stakeholders in order to document the range and type of organizational issues faced by managers. These interview data constitute study four; they were encoded in a report sent back to the organizations for verification of their accuracy (Braithwaite, 1999).
In the fifth study, four focus groups of clinician managers drawn from various organizations, talking about their management work, its trials and tribulations, were facilitated between November 1996 and May 1997. Participants were not provided with any background information about evolutionary perspectives, lekking or ethology. They were merely asked to discuss their experience of working as managers. These discussions were taped, transcribed and content-analyzed (Braithwaite, 1999).
Finally, in study six, non-participant observations of 24 senior managers were conducted in another academic medical centre from 1999 to 2002 as they went through their strategic planning activities, and during their day-to-day operational management activities. Field notes were created of these observations and associated organizational documentation was gathered for subsequent review.
Data analysis
The foci of attention through these studies was clinician-managers' behavioural and discourse displays across years of study. This created multiple data sets, insights, ideas, interpretations and perspectives reflected in the field materials and what they meant, which shifted over time as researcher understanding changed. Standard texts on data analysis tend not to problematise the complexity and iterative nature of the data-assembly and meaning-derivation processes, and there are few guidelines on how to synthesize extensive longitudinal data sets. To provide a way to proceed, a logical frame was designed to order the data.
This frame (Figure 1) imposed rigor over the data analysis process across 3D. The first dimension was investigator predilections and influences. Observations were determined by five galvanizing interests that were centrally concerned with orientations around the ethological and the emic. The deep perspective was evolutionary, and this was influenced by male dominance and lekking literature. Past ethnographic work which realised more etic than emic accounts was also influential. The second dimension was the field observations, encoded in various perspectives and written documents, which together made up an extended set of materials. These were read, reflected on, coded, re-read, summarized and categorized, re-read, re-summarized and re-categorized in various ways over time. These field notes and transcripts and their syntheses largely informed the interpretive progression. The third dimension in some respects was the product of the two, although in practice the emergence of the empirically-derived topics was much more iterative and messy than Figure 1 might imply.
Thus, the findings were examined under four headings typically mobilized by ethologists when they investigate other species: what is the nature of the habitats in which displays occur, how do displayers appear, what are the social structures, and what benefits accrue to successful displayers? In addition to these four, two additional headings surfaced from the documented findings during the researcher interaction with the materials: how are tasks and work assigned, and, because humans talk and make facial expressions, how was their visage and discourse registered when in organizational display? It is to the reporting of these results that we now turn.
Results
Results are thus reported under six headings, in the following order: habitats, appearance, task and work assignment, interactional structure, talk and physiognomy, and benefits and outcomes of organizational lekking. The categories task and work assignment and talk and physiognomy go beyond what could be expected in an ethologist's report of animal behaviour in natural settings, because work and talk of course, are uniquely human activities.
Habitats
Where does the lekking male work when organizationally in situ? The habitat here is the large specialized academic medical centre, but there are many sub-habitats. The lekking male manager was constantly involved with organizational others. The work is intensively interactive. He thus displayed publicly for the majority of time, and only sporadically was found alone. Sitting quietly reading, attending to some paperwork or spending much more than a few minutes in front of a computer to write or download a report or attend to some e-mail were not prominent behaviours. When subjects performed these kinds of activities it was often done in a hurry or undertaken “after hours”, i.e. when most people had left for the day. Much of this work was also reportedly done at home.
In order of time spent in organizational lekking, sub-habitats subjects were found in: specific-purpose meeting, committee or board rooms; private offices; and corridors. Less frequently subjects were observed in a general office or a public workplace area where the non-managerial workers were located. Subjects only infrequently visited the cafeteria for lunch, morning or afternoon tea. Lunch and tea breaks were invariably taken on the run rather than in a formally allocated place or at an identified time. Perhaps, tellingly it is the non-managerial staff who regularly take an allocated period of time to partake of these rhythmic rituals.
So, the commonest place to observe organizational lekking was at meetings. Whenever one was held, whether formal or informal, scheduled or impromptu, the senior ranking manager virtually always assumed responsibility for chairing it. Others deferred to this authority seemingly automatically. Even when someone more junior was appointed as chair of a specific purpose meeting, if a senior manager was present, he palpably held and was accorded greater status. In addition, when meetings occurred in someone's office as opposed to a purpose-designated meeting room, it was almost always held in the highest ranking person's office. In part, this is because size of office was closely and positively associated with rank. There is in most cases an invariant rule: whoever might ask for or convene a meeting, it was taken-for-granted it would be held in the senior person's larger office. Only occasionally, and almost for novelty, was it held in a subordinate's office.
Although there could be quite robust discussions by participants, the most senior manager was clearly in charge and displayed a stream of behaviour to show this, in line with his privileged, dominant position. Thus, for example, he was observed to do one or more of: speak first or on arrival at the meeting room, open the meeting, summarize why participants had assembled on this occasion, outline what the topic or topic areas to be covered were, introduce guests, sit at the head of the table
Appearance
How did subjects display sartorially? The uniform of lekking male managers was ubiquitous. It comprised a dark suit, a light shirt and the flash of bright colour of a silk (or perhaps silk blend) tie on the breast. This typical visual display of males did offer some variation, but only at the margins. The suit was usually navy blue or mid to dark grey, and occasionally, green or black. This accorded with (Molloy, 1975, 1988) dictums for what constitutes power dressing. Suits could be double or single breasted and frequently exhibited a subtle pin striped or check design, but never spots or flowers. Sometimes younger lekking males would appear in some variation of garb to this, such as in a more adventurous check design.
The major departure from this ensemble was the navy blazer or checked jacket accompanied by flannel grey, mid-to dark beige or dark green or blue slacks. Very infrequently doctors with a combined part-time clinical and part-time managerial role could come to a meeting in a white coat, but this was unusual. They normally dispensed with this clinical display at management meetings. Most doctor-managers came from their patient care activities re-attired in their suit or jacket-and-slacks.
Shirts were almost always light blue, white or cream. Sometimes a thin stripe of navy blue or a check design was seen, but these latter were rarely outlandish. Now and again someone wore a dark grey or blue shirt or a brighter blue, green or pink alternative. Collar and cuffs could differ in colour from the rest of the shirt, and at special events (defined almost always with reference to a visit by a dignitary or other high-status person from outside the organization
Belts and shoes were black and plain, and were made from (or were a synthetic version of) the tanned hide of other animals we know as leather. A buckle of silver or gold was acceptable in belts and very infrequently in shoes. Shoes – smooth or patterned (e.g. brogue), lace up or slip on – virtually always looked freshly polished. Socks could be either black or very dark blue, with an optional pattern or splash of colour, but generally these were not as gaudy as the tie.
Jewellery was worn sparingly, and often comprised a watch of silver, gold or occasionally black and a finger ring or two. It was extremely rare for any of the senior male managers, and almost as rare for the less senior male managers, to display the ear studs, neck or wrist jewellery which can sometimes be observed in males of similar age in other social habitats such as leisure settings.
The pièce de résistance was the tie, which often caught the eye from a distance, like the peacock's plumage, and seems visually to be almost the male human's display equivalent. The tie could be any colour from crimson through electric blue, gold, red, maroon, purple or green. It could be a combination of one or more of these. Occasionally, it might be a bow tie. It was virtually always patterned or textured, and sometimes came with expressive and innovative design features. It was infrequently of a sober style. This choice was more popular with older subjects and was distinguishable from the more radical breast ensembles. This was a highly conservative tie of black, blue, maroon or grey with a crest or stylized design that presented to the observer as the colours of a university, club or professional body.
Subjects invariably looked neat. They seemed well groomed, with short, recently-washed hair, pressed clothes, shaven faces (or with trimmed beards or moustaches) and were never merely unshaved. They were mostly neutral smelling or mildly perfumed.
There were unspoken rules governing the relaxation of the more formal display at the end of the day. It was acceptable but not obligatory to pull one's tie down or take it off, unfastening the top one (occasionally two) buttons. Optionally, one could roll up one's sleeves. But, it was clearly unacceptable to be dishevelled or to “dress down” at any time. The sole exception was when subjects came together at the occasional external, after hours or weekend social events, at which what are known as “smart casual” clothes became the uniform. This typically comprised a checked or striped open-necked shirt, beige or green pants or denim jeans, brown casual or smart running shoes (the latter inscribed with some form of logo or pattern) and a less-formal belt than that worn during worktime. This outfit was equally widespread, and seemed virtually as compulsory as was the suit or jacket-and-slacks worn during working time.
Task and work assignment
How do tasks get done, and work get assigned? Largely through the exercise of power and influence? At bottom for managers getting work done is about verbally or non-verbally expressing purpose. This includes giving orders and instructions; making suggestions; offering guidance, motivation and encouragement; agreeing or squabbling over what to do and how to do it; negotiating and bargaining over budgets, deadlines, goals and objectives; disciplining, sanctioning or bounding unwarranted behaviour; writing or replying to letters, e-mail and memoranda; and commissioning, writing and reviewing reports and other papers. These routines were highly patterned, interactive and political.
Lekking senior managers rarely gave instructions overtly; they were often covert or ambiguous. “Orders” were made mainly as polite suggestions, or requests. They could even come across as ideas that were being canvassed or simply as thoughts that were being aired. Three typical examples amongst many illustrate this. First: “I wonder if we might move to doing X” meant that part of a project was running late and staff needed to work hard to get to the next stage. Second: “Who should attend to this? Should we develop that idea further?” expressed what everyone seemed to know: that a report from the director of human resources on absenteeism was overdue and would be expected soon. Third: “I'm not looking at any [budget] enhancements” was code that the CEO was forcefully prohibiting any new expenditure, and curtailing existing spending, until further notice.
When required, however, most observed managers could be assertive and sometimes aggressive toward their subordinates, but this was not seen frequently in interrelationships amongst peers. It was even less likely from subordinate to superior. For the most part, the direction of task and work assignment was down the hierarchical ranking, and direct commands were by no means the norm. For many managers, most of the time the exercise of bare power in task and work assignment remained latent until needed.
Notwithstanding, the apparently light touch with power when the most senior managers made these kinds of verbalizations, they were frequently perceived as having the iron force of requirements. Discussions after meetings, where the most senior manager who made such an utterance was no longer present, constantly reinforced the view that regardless of the way instructions were given, they were to be treated as if they were commands with a firm time frame for completion. If these utterances were not accompanied by a clear deadline or plan to move forward subordinates projected one into their subsequent discussions based on their knowledge of organizational issues and other tasks and work they knew were underway.
This does not mean that subordinates did not disagree with, grumble about or try to think of ways of turning around ideas expressed by managers senior to them. But, although this kind of negative response can be articulated amongst junior colleagues backstage, there were few times when the most senior managers' suggestions were not accorded considerable weight.
Having said this, there is no doubt that there were high levels of ambiguity, and various multiple and conflicting agendas in play over any issue, at any time. Politics and subtle pursuits of differing goals and the presence of multiple, conflicting viewpoints and attitudes was the norm within organizations included in the research. There were also numerous examples of misunderstandings, miscommunications, people not being available when needed, issues “falling through the cracks” and what participants sometimes gleefully labeled “stuff-ups” or were described more profanely. But against all this, if the CEO or someone of recognized high status had voiced an opinion or made mild suggestions about an issue, subordinates would often spend considerable time, energy and expertise trying to “deliver” on their interpretation of what was needed, or justify to themselves why this was unachievable.
Physical interactional structure
How do subjects physically interact with others? The patterns of display were almost entirely centred on talk and interaction which appears for the most part to be conducted at a socially accepted distance. When sitting or standing (but not when a desk was in between participants) this is around half a meter to a meter or so of space between individuals. Organizational humans for the most part act in these types of setting as if they have an invisible and relatively inviolable bubble around them. Very rarely was there any direct touching between participants.
Two exceptions to this general rule were observed. First, handshaking was fairly commonplace, but in defined circumstances. It rarely occurred between subjects who saw each other frequently or knew each other well. It was reserved for meetings between relative strangers (e.g. external guests) or those who had not seen each other for a while, such as when someone returned from an absence. Second, the celebratory pat or hug occurred on occasions. Infrequently this was a seemingly spontaneous pat on the shoulder (or sometimes the back). Very infrequently, a kiss on the cheek was noted, or, even rarer, a hug between colleagues was observed. A pat could be glancing or firm but was never hearty in the way it can be between close friends or relatives. Some would indulge in this behaviour occasionally, and others never did. It was offered when someone was judged to have done well. The hug was different. It was offered (and accepted sometimes awkwardly) when there was a major celebration such as a big promotion or a major condolence, e.g. the death of someone close.
In most cases, the person patting was more senior than the recipient. It was a male to male ritual. In contrast, the hug was more likely to be from a more junior to more senior staff member. It was largely female to male or female to female. The kiss on the cheek also occurred sparingly, and was a female to female, or occasionally a female to male or male to female activity; it was never male to male.
Close shave or accidental physical contact occurred regularly. There were two kinds. One was the almost touching or accidental bumping that occurs when people have limited space. Examples included where two, three or more people were walking along a corridor shoulder-to-shoulder, with almost imperceptible close shave, or actualized shoulder- or hip-glancing events. Another was the occasional meeting where there were more attendees than expected and the room was crowded. Chairs were necessarily closely adjacent to each other, such that some participants almost, and sometimes did, brush against each other. In these types of circumstances, people appeared covertly to make considerable effort in trying to avoid sustained or even glancing touching of knees, elbows or shoulders. If it became obvious that this had occurred, and knees or shoulders touched momentarily, or any other bumping-into behaviour occurred, one or both of the contactors might quietly say “sorry” and simultaneously withdraw, or just ignore what had happened. This behaviour was quite different from that which occurs in sporting crowds where shoulder, arm, leg and hip touching is sometimes constant and unavoidable, and people are generally not concerned about it
The second prominent close shave, almost touching activity was the tête-à-tête (sometimes multiple tête-à-têtes) huddle. There were many backstage meetings (outside of more formally established or convened committees and executive events) in which participants intensively discussed workplace occurrences in camera. Often, they comprised a kind of clandestine discussion between people of similar organizational ranking. This presented as an expression of alliance formation for common purpose. The discourse consisted often of a seemingly random walk across all manner of topics – a heady mix of official business and workplace decision-making interspersed with small talk, gossip, innuendo, jokes, blasphemy and politics. Body language and talk was more socially intimate and physically close. Conjoined participants at such meetings were often conspiring to achieve various self-defined objectives. In other words, people could informally talk about what is formally unspoken – how to pursue one's naked ambition and get on in the world, how to defeat others politically, and how stupid, irrelevant, crass or unpopular others were or could be. The social distance between collaborators engaged in gossip or politics tended to be close, and talk became more intimate, more animated, and sometimes profane.
On one occasion, this type of meeting was held over a special lunch, and was largely an in camera meeting to plot the downfall of a manager not deemed to be performing satisfactorily. Conspirators were unusually nervous about having an external researcher-observer present, and eventually the meeting petered out. It was held subsequently without any external presence
In sum, physical contact was limited and mostly avoided. It was not acceptable to engage in display leading to holding, touching, patting, hugging, kissing on the cheek and the like except in highly circumscribed and ritualized ways.
Talk and physiognomy
What do lekking males talk about if we disaggregate the weave of their discourse, and what facial expressions are displayed? Content analysis of the focus group and interview transcripts (studies four and five) revealed that managers' talk centred on fourteen topics related to their work. These reflected their managerial interests and concerns. Table I summarizes the fourteen management categories, and shows the amount of talk subjects spent on each category
The table suggests several things about the verbal displays. Although their talk (like the talk reflected in many researchers' field note transcripts) seemed superficially messy, there was an underlying structure to subjects' managerial interests and concerns. These managers had a wide range of things to which to attend. Managing people was their single biggest concern. This category, along with more general organizational issues, structural and hierarchical concerns, and budgetary matters, taken together, represented more than half of all managerial talk. Words which would suggest an interest in managerial topics like quality management, data management, strategic planning and external relations were not so prominent.
In order to introduce a measure of validation to this categorization of talk the field notes from studies two and three were mapped to these focus group categories. This involved classifying the field note text within these categories and cutting and pasting the text into the fourteen headings. The mapping revealed that the amount of time managers spent on each managerial category (reflected roughly by the volume of field notes under that category) largely corresponded to the proportion of talk spent on each category in the focus groups. The schema thus seems quite robust and suggests that talking about the substance of management work and doing it (at least at the gross level) are useful indicators of each other.
These data also suggest that despite the advent of relatively new management ideas like total quality management (TQM), knowledge management and strategic management to mention only three, the content of participants' managerial work remained at a fundamental level much the same as it had been since the earliest managerial studies. Although they have multiple and sometimes conflicting agenda, most managers' time was taken up with recurring management issues like people problems and finance. However, across the decade of these research studies, managerial work does seem to have become increasingly intensive and busy, or at least, judged by their talk, participants perceived this to be the case.
Another feature of the patterns of participants' talk is that they were defining of “we” and “they”. There was dense jargon and frequent use of acronyms permeating senior management talk. Some of it pertained to management-speak and some was organizationally-specific discourse which differed from site to site. To the outsider, this can mean that discussions are hard to access. All the regular players at any particular site were privy to this insider language. Occasionally, a recruit was appointed from outside and struggled with a “learning curve” until proficient in the peculiar configurations of that particular organization's talk. Sometimes this was a doctor, promoted to a senior management job from the ranks of the senior specialists within. In such cases, the initiatee was a relative novice in the management-speak and had some time to spend before being able to participate fully. If a novice was quiet during early meetings and was asked by the chair or someone senior if he or she had any questions, a typical response was to acknowledge that he or she was “on a steep learning curve”. It was rare that anyone new publicly acknowledged their problem (which we might label the jargon-deficiency syndrome), although in smaller informal meetings questions might be asked about what words, phrases or acronyms meant, or the syndrome might be admitted to trusted others. It could be laughed off publicly to cover embarrassment such as for example: “Hang on guys … and I thought [specialist] medical talk was dense … ”. Over time for each novice, however, the managerial communicative practices were learnt, and after about six months and up to a year, occasionally longer, fairly full participation in discussions was possible. It seems that a permit into the managerial club's discursive repertoires (but not always with full membership rights even then) was granted roughly within the first year of joining the management ranks.
In addition, for these subjects, informal talk peppered their in situ discourse. Thus, there was a 15th category of talk. This was the social discussions, politics, banter, humorous interchanges and the like which permeates all discourse regardless of setting. Following (Dunbar, 1996) this category of talk is a considerable proportion of total discourse. The small talk and gossip seemed to represent a kind of social lubrication that oils the interpersonal wheels of the formal organization. This was the grapevine in action. Chit-chat like this undergirded much of the interplay between people in the organizations studied. Such “non-work” occurs frequently. There was rarely any length of time except at the most formal of meetings when “work” conversation did not give way to gossip and chit-chat. This occurred in brief snatches, then the “work talk” would resume. The most senior manager was generally at liberty to initiate or conclude the social talk. It may be that high-status individuals expound on current affairs, sport and the like to show their knowledge in a competitive ecology within a peer group
Moreover, just as there was a behavioural pecking order observed at meetings, there was a verbal pecking order discernible in the organizational talk. The two orders seem clearly related. For example, the senior ranking manager invariably offered the most comments at meetings, or seemed to be accorded the right to do so whenever he so chose, and tended to be the least-interrupted person. In the focus groups, male managers spoke on average in longer speech bursts than females. In other words, male managers spoke for a longer period, and used more words per utterance, than did female managers.
Facially, subjects in the hospital habitat displayed a wide range of emotions relative to the largely conservative setting. These were rarely unfettered, however. Emotional expression and its accompanying physiognomy appeared somewhat reserved. For the great majority of time, the subjects displayed thoughtful, controlled impassivity considering the barrage of ideas and events that occurred rapidly each day.
This was particularly so when compared say to the physiognomy of humans under more open social circumstances such as when observing a humorous or challenging play, drinking and socializing in a bar or watching a game of football. Nevertheless, physiognomic variation abounded. Visible exemplars of various emotions were displayed. Instances of expressions were observed which were interpretable as anger, sadness, hurt, concern, smugness, stress, condescension, arrogance, pain, being troubled, delight, celebration, achievement, pleasure, wonderment, winning and pride. But, all seemed muted to suit some sort of taken-for-granted understanding of what constituted organizational decorum.
Benefits and outcomes
What of the benefits and outcomes which could be seen to accrue to the successful lekking manager? Personal outcomes included enhanced perks, status, income and prestige. For instance, top-ranking senior managers were provided with large offices, expensive-looking furniture, assistants and support staff, computers, including laptops, late-model motor vehicles and higher salaries than others
One prevalent theme for a sizeable number of subjects was a perception that they were working hard and deserved the benefits they had already secured. Some participants sought more rewards for their efforts. Another key theme was whether equity prevailed in the distribution of benefits. Those who felt disadvantaged were especially vocal (to colleagues), and a small but noticeable number of managers were often trying to think of ways to manoeuvre for an increase in their income or benefits. Some participants never talked of these things, and others constantly made reference to them.
The more senior the manager in the chain of command, the more expensive the perks. Regardless of how valued by the recipients these benefits were, it nevertheless seemed constantly to be the case that the exercise of and accumulation of power may themselves be a desirable reward. The observer was reminded perennially of Henry Kissinger's dictum to the effect that power is a great aphrodisiac. It seems good to be the king, with the privileges that come with it, or even the baron of a section of an organization.
Multiple career benefits were also apparent. These included climbing the organizational pecking order, gaining experience and seniority, and positioning oneself for future promotion. These pursuits were rarely spoken about in formal meetings, but at informal huddles managers at the same level were more open with trusted opposite numbers about what career progress they were happy with, and what they desired.
There was a level of in camera, back stage dissatisfaction voiced at times about salary levels, the stress of the work, the long days and the difficulty in doing all that was required. Most subjects did work long hours, took work home, and sometimes came in on weekends. But, regardless of levels of expressed satisfaction and dissatisfaction, successful lekking on balance seemed pleasurable for the displaying manager. It came accompanied by numerous personal and career benefits not available to other employees. Senior managers left sporadically, and when they did, it was mostly for higher status work, or it was projected by them that this was the reason for leaving. During the period of observation, only occasionally were senior managers “downsized”, and when it was done it was accomplished by restructuring and declaring the position redundant, or not renewing a contract. Rarely was anyone directly dismissed for poor performance or misconduct.
Discussion
Successful organizational lekking and its rewards to dominant males
Successful male managers dominate in the organizational lek in observable ways. We can join together the dots like the pointillist to assemble an emergent picture. Thriving lekkers are accorded considerable status and exercise more influence than others in various sub-habitats, notably in the main ones, meeting rooms and private offices. They show their wares via a clearly identifiable, virtually universal facade: power dressing is highly regimented and routinised. Conformity – the tendency for lekking managers' behaviour to pattern together – was high. Whilst the fibrous threads of cooperation are everywhere (after all, as functionalists have long said, an organization is a social device normatively designed to bring people together for common purpose), nevertheless competition seems to be a major stimulus for male lekkers.
Power is not generally exercised in brutal ways as it might be by a modern counterpart to Machiavelli's (1988) renaissance prince or by aggressively lekking Scottish stags, but is expressed through adroit, largely polite and often ambiguous discourse and behavioural responses. Beneath the surface, however, lie considerable politics, playmaking, and will to win. Physical contact is minimized except in accidental or ritualized ways. Talk is about a wide range of issues but centres on people and their management above all. The countenance of lekking males shows a pluralist range of emotions, although these are rarely extreme; instead, they seem to be modified into a conformist countenance by the social circumstances.
The germ of a deep explanation for ambition may be possible to discern. There must be a genetic space for both the intelligence of individuals as well as for group success as early hominids had no evolved physical weapons (e.g. fangs or claws). They could only survive in Africa by ingenious physical and social innovations (e.g. tools and group interaction). A lesson from primates, and humans in contemporary social settings, is that groups seem always to be enacted hierarchically. Within the group, many males want to be the α male, the boss. In contemporary societies and institutions avoiding being eaten by predators has for many given way to aspirational, ambition-realizing pursuits. Non-sexual organizational lekking appearance, talk and behaviour are the observed modes of production in aspiring up the hierarchy. Yet, survival may not be too far away from the core of an explanatory mechanism for aspirational lekking behaviour. Monkeys at the bottom of the hierarchy are more prone to cardiac disease than other troupe members (Becker et al., 1992). So, too are employees in the lowliest jobs in the Bell telephone company and the British civil service (Marmot et al., 1991, 1978). Reach the top as a primate on the African savannah and you will get to transmit your genes to the next generation and have more chances to outlast your competitors. Be in the top ranks in your organization and you are less likely than your power- and authority-deprived colleagues to suffer heart problems and early mortality, and more likely to secure material rewards. Have things changed much?
The profile of behaviour reported here represents a window into a set of communicative verbal and non-verbal practices. Lekking male managers are in effect involved in a continuous stream of signalling to organizational others. Signalling is a means of manipulation, designed to influence receivers' behaviour (Johnstone, 1997). Biologists have shown that the signals of many animals exhibit common characteristics (Fleishman, 1998, 1988, 1992; Cullen, 1966). They need to be conspicuously detectable by receivers, and this involves repetition of display to the point of redundancy, thereby to avoid ambiguity and misinterpretation. Signals are highly stereotyped, again so that receivers do not find it difficult to classify the incoming message. Display may be complex but comprises a set of alerting components. In the case of the present subjects and the context of their settings, each of these characteristics of signalling is present. We have seen how lekking male managers' ritualized talk, behaviour and appearance are highly conspicuous, stereotyped and repetitive. They can be broken down into alerting components, as indicated in the findings reported above. It is not too difficult to benchmark these points of comparison to show similarities between male managers' organizational displays and the signalling behaviour of anoline lizards (Marchetti, 1993) warblers (Wiley, 1991) oscine birds (Endler, 1978) and guppy fish (Richardson et al., 1994). Signalling to manipulate others and secure rewards seems ubiquitous.
There may be other plausible explanations for organizational lekking behaviour. Control seems related to and served through the authoritative display we see in power dressing. In some settings (such as the contemporary information technology industry) it may be moving on from the days of the ubiquitous IBM and General Motors dress-code (Martin and Siehl, 1983; Martin, 2002), but in others it is remarkably similar to this code. This is relatively unexplored terrain. Management as a naturalistic pageant of rich displays, as the performative enactment of appearance in the context of socio-organizational dynamics, as the silently conspicuous negotiation of meaning and as the simultaneously flaunted yet subtly concealed sartorial projection, exhibited in order to mobilize, persuade, convince and resource, is underplayed in past work. Enhanced understanding of the-organization-as-lekking-habitat through the prosecution of this and related lines of enquiry might prove fruitful.
On the use of new ways of looking at behaviour
Much past work reviews empirically, or theorizes about, management behaviour in context, or analyzes or conceptualizes tasks, functions and the exercise of power. No study can be pointed to that exploits the device of the lekking habitat and male displays within it as an analytic template to account for managerial behaviour in situ. It seems reasonable to use such analytic framing devices, if only to highlight human in contrast to animal lekking. We have barely scratched the surface of understanding humans' behaviour within their social habitats.
These studies provide a way of describing managerial behaviour, and how it appears to a researcher who adopts an ethological stance. Organizational lekking, which differs from male sexual display in the wild because it is not overtly mobilized to persuade females to mate, nevertheless shares many of its features. For some, it may appear to serve as a metaphor, but it is nevertheless tied to the past as evolutionary proto-typical behaviour, and acts to emphasize the biological roots of this. It is a novel way of conceptualizing male dominance and display. It has been described here ethologically rather than ethnographically and this approach tries to see behaviour emically, not as the participant-observer but as the non-involved, unobtrusive apprehender with a naturalistic, evolutionary-oriented perspective. Ethnography seeks by contrast to observe behaviour within the context of the dominant culture, and mostly provides an etic account, with the researcher not only construed and construing as an insider but as someone who makes meaning by drawing on his or her own contemporaneous reserves and perspectives, and by virtue of an acceptance of his or her membership of the cultural group. The lens shifts with ethology, and in the shifting, a different account is enabled.
The research exploited here differs from, but is backgrounded by, other ways of apprehending people and what and how they do what they do. Birdwhistell's (1970) kinesics is a micro-level analytic approach to cataloguing and analyzing videotaped body movements. In Birdwhistell's work human conduct is broken into its constituent parts. There are different kinds of gestures, for example, and a variety of movements in discrete parts of the face including the brows, lips, eyes and cheeks. These can be classified. Video-taped body movements – nods of the head, shrugs of the shoulders, pelvic thrusts, and slumps in chairs – are meticulously reported, frame-by-frame. His interest in symbolic interactionist, non-verbal communication has been influential to a cohort of observationalists including Goffman (1971), McNeill (1992) and Kendon (1990). Ethologically influenced observational work can be contrasted with other traditions. In the pantheon of hearing and seeing research, the present approach sits somewhere between fine, video-taped micro-accounts on the one hand and wider, abstracted accounts on the other. The former are represented in Birdwhistell's keenly-sliced micro-depictions of body motion, in which even ear movements and nostril flares are categorized, and the micro-sociology interested in slivers of behaviour which lead to some understandings of how people cheat, argue, eat, favour others and mobilize bias (Mangham, 1986).
The findings from the present studies have therefore been rendered as ethologically clearly as was achievable to the extent possible for one who is trained in interpretivism. For instance, it has taken a major effort to describe behaviour without being seduced into “seeing” managerial functions being performed. Past literature accounts, the taken-for-granted, prevailing ways of reporting research findings and our own training in organizational behaviour all hold us captive, and conspire against laying down an ethologically oriented version. To do so involves looking at display as it presents behaviourally rather than as it seems culturally. Taking a lek-eye view of the organizational sub-habitats, while simultaneously minimizing one's own interpretivist leanings and discounting one's subjects' cultural characteristics, is challenging. Nevertheless, this is what has been attempted.
This is not a claim for a factualist, realist position, but a plea for placing more emphasis on what is seen than what is imagined and narrated. Although ethology might seduce some into yearning for a place called Aston, where normal science in objective mode reigned in organisational studies, this is neither the intention nor the realized outcome. Rather, borrowing from Hardy and Clegg (1997), we might see an ethologically created account as serving three criteria of empirically derived theory: differentiation from other offerings; referenced to other kinds of traditions (in this case, the biological and social), and pluralism. In the latter case, a new account can provide the pre-conditions for the interplay between extant organizational paradigms and conceptualizations of the strange or new.
Methodological issues in consilience studies
That said, there are methodological issues in longitudinal, triangulated observational work carried out over lengthy periods. Little guidance has been assembled by organizational researchers for those choosing extensive pluralist research designs with multiple sites and orientations. Some critics might be concerned about the scientific value of such work, especially its replicability and generalizability. Others might argue that the attempt to explain research in 3D (Figure 1), intended as a clarificatory device, might achieve the opposite, and expose how complex the present research process has been. Such criticism is at the heart of an endeavour which attempts to achieve consilience, and to enable boundary-riding across the interstices of scientific and social scientific domains.
One clue to an accounting for this rests with how we define the undertaking we call “research”. Wilson (1998, p. 57) proposes in Consilience that the essence of science is “the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles”. This is a useful definition for anyone, whether in science or social science, qualitative or quantitative, emic or etic, experimental, causal, survey or evaluation research mode.
Three other broad responses to this problematic can be adduced. One is provided by Karl Popper, the philosopher of science. He argued that even with the most rigorous scientific evidence, one cannot prove anything conclusively. There might always come along one or more counterfactuals. Thus, all knowledge, according to this argument, is tentative, and subject to falsifiability processes (Popper, 1959; Scruton, 1994). The present findings, no less or more than the most clear-cut experimental laboratory results, are tentative hypotheses, what Wilson called ‘testable laws and principles’. They become more accepted if they resist multiple attempts to refute them. This is a task for future researchers.
A second answer to those who are concerned with loosely-coupled, multiple studies being synthesized into an overall set of findings centres on Nobel Laureate Simon's (1983) approach to creativity in research. Simon (1983, p. 4569) held:
[…] what chiefly characterizes creative thinking from more mundane forms are (i) willingness to accept vaguely defined problem statements and gradually structure them, (ii) continuing preoccupation with problems over a considerable period of time, and (iii) extensive background knowledge in relevant and potentially relevant areas.
This elegantly and efficiently tells the story of the research journey to produce the present findings.The third response rests with recent approaches exploiting meta-ethnography (Britten et al., 2004). Some anthropologists and sociologists are attempting to unify the results of disparate qualitative studies such that the coherent whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Taken together, these philosophies and perspectives on method suggest that despite the present work embracing a science-inspired, ethological stance, there is always a strong interpretive element in research of this kind. Working in the science-social science borderlands can illuminate both perspectives. But, however the results are construed, they are submitted, in line with these arguments, as tentative, testable, falsifiable, conjectural propositions, subject to refutation under criticism.
Conclusion
In presenting these results an effort has been made to explain male managerial endeavour lekking not so much in terms of human or organizational culture, as is usually the case in organizational studies, but so far as possible in terms of behavioural displays. In this respect the method adopted here owes more to ethology than it does to ethnography, and as much to scientific observational practices than social scientific interpretivist approaches.
Yet, an obvious point of difficulty might be cultural. The subjects were almost all from the dominant liberal-democratic-capitalist tradition: that is, they tended to be individualistic, of western orientation, with a predominant social status of middle class WASPs or WASCs and occasionally Western Jewish. Despite the multicultural nature of many Western societies these groups populate the ranks of lekking manager in the academic medical centres of the present studies. The observer has a similar background. This narrowness could be balanced by a wider set of more pluralist studies and investigators.
This work is also unambiguously centred on male displaying. It is highly likely that women display differently. Sociologists or semioticians of behaviour might predict that there are similarities and differences, and these clearly need to be investigated. To advance two conjectures for which there is a degree of evidence: firstly, female managers tend to display differently in appearance to their male counterparts, and they tend to be more collaborative (Sheppard, 1992; Kanter, 1977; Wolf, 1991). Even naïve observations suggest that what constitutes power dressing in female managers is more heterogeneous than in males. Secondly, female managers seem to have a distinguishable set of behavioural repertoires. Many women's managerial style is reportedly less hierarchical (Richardson et al., 1994; Coleman, 2000), more democratic (Pines et al., 2001; Rosenthal, 1998), more interactive (Webster et al., 1999) and more relational (Barrette, 1995; Buttner, 2001) than men's, although this may be changing, and arguably some sort of convergence of male and female styles is in train (Wajcman, 1996; Rinfret and Lortie-Lussier, 1997).
Statisticians in future work may want to undertake studies which measure rates of various behavioural occurrences such as handshaking, time spent talking and listening at meetings, how long neck ties stay on after work and proportions of time spent on, and incidence categories of behaviours such as attending to rumors, doing non-work versus work activities and the like. Other features might impact on lekking behaviour such as an individual's height, weight, assertiveness and voice modularity. We do not now know about the variety of lekking displays or their influences. Such studies could be useful, but it is important to remember that ethological, ethnographic, observational and discourse-analytic work are best construed as a holistic activity rather than understandable in reductio.
More broadly, organizational researchers might think of how the evolved nature of human behaviour could be factored into future studies. The field of evolutionary psychology is beginning to emerge, and there is now a textbook for those studying it as a discipline (Barrett et al., 2002), but there is no corresponding development as yet of a field we might come to call evolutionary organizational behaviour. This might be a satisfying and paradigm-enlarging scholarly pursuit.
If further studies examining human lekking behaviour are warranted, several lines of possible enquiry have potential. In the spirit of consilience other triangulation work, or fusion of ethological-scientific and ethnographic-interpretivist approaches, might be usefully employed. The answers to various questions may be pursued. What happens under various conditions, in alternative habitats, and how do different kinds of people display? How does display change in times of crisis, or resource abundance, for example, or under conditions of organizational growth, downsizing or restructuring? What display varieties of appearance, talk and behaviour occur in habitats as diverse as in the first year arts University lecture theatre, on the bridge of a super tanker, at the sports gymnasium, in the gay bar, in the primary school playground at lunch time and at the meeting of local parish priests? One kind of manager in one particular setting has been considered here, but the academic medical centre is a relatively conservative environment. What about lekking in a looser, more flexible organizational form such as a dot.com in contrast to the academic hospital habitat? Future researchers may like to consider these kinds of lekking environments or display ensembles.
Figure 13D data analysis frame
Table ICategorised interests and concerns of focus group participants as reflected in their talk
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Corresponding author
Jeffrey Braithwaite can be contacted at: j.braithwaite@unsw.edu.au